Economizing
I have often said that if and when I write my definitive autobiography, there is only one title that I can use. I will call it The Hole in My Pocket. That title suits me because I have lived life without much budgetary concern. Attribute this in a good way to my mother. Despite that she was a product of the Great Depression, it does not seem to have affected her the way it did many other people. The truth is, I never knew her to worry about money. When she had it, she spent it and when she didn’t have it, she didn’t spend it nor did she want for it. I determined a long time ago that that was a good way to live. And while I strongly believe in living life without regrets, the knowledge I have gained about the time value of money sometimes makes me think of all the places I could have conserved and saved rather than spent and shrugged. Unless I live way longer than the actuarial predictions imply, I should be able to make it on what I have, but the place I have often thought would be so comfortable in a financial sense is where the natural time value of money accumulation exceeded my outflows such that my net worth would just continue to rise as a function of the passage of time. I’ve come to understand that goal is only achievable if you do not have a hole in your pocket.
Some aspects of that hole seem justifiable to me. For instance, money that I give my children that I spend on family and friends. I believe generosity is a virtue that pays handsome life dividends, even if that’s not reflected in your wallet. And then there are those aspects of that hole in my pocket that relate to life discipline in terms of expenditures that are truly unnecessary and sometimes arbitrary. I’ve spent a fair amount of time, since moving to this hilltop in retirement, getting a grip on my utilities. First and foremost, there is the cost of electricity. I addressed that through investment in the top quality solar system, including two Tesla batteries. In general, I feel like can declare victory over my electric consumption, but it’s still unclear to me that the return on investment is all that it should’ve been. I suspect whatever electric breakage there is has something to do with my use of air conditioning and electric vehicle charging. I have noticed that my electric bill is lower this year than last, but that may be due to another investment I made last year in a new air conditioning unit on the north side of my property. Gain in system efficiency is probably what has caused the savings. Once again, if I would play financial analyst, it’s unclear whether this was an investment that produced the fully anticipated economic benefits but at least I can say that I’ve managed to stay cool and it all seems to be with less of a monthly electric bill.
The other major utilities are propane and water. I have a decent handle on propane now that I more closely control my spa heating only when necessary. And then there is water. I have all the controls to make that as efficient as possible, but I cannot control the weather and when it gets and stays hot as it has this summer, all I can do is tweak the frequency and amount of watering I do in the specified 24 zones. I will declare water to be my weak utility spot, but it is more for love of garden than lack of attention that it goes higher when it does.
One of the areas where I think added scrutiny is always required these days is in the automatic subscription renewals that dominate our credit card bills and both sneak up on us if we are unaware and probably attack us fraudulently in ways that we tend to ignore because they seem small, even though they all add up in a more meaningful way. I’ve written about how some companies, particularly ones like the big telecoms and especially the computer system protection companies like McAfee and Norton, use what I consider to be less than ethical practices to ensure their collection of what must be countless microfees. Those battles seem endless because, like the incipient Spam coming through to your text, email and even cell phone accounts, simply shutting these perpetrators down does not necessarily cause them to go away. My use of a tracking system called Rocket Money helps at the margin, but still does not completely solve the problem.
Some of the fiscal battles have to be undertaken on a hand-to-hand basis. I recently had such a run-in with LA Fitness. This is the company that so upset Kim during COVID that she refuses to use their facilities even though they are very convenient to us. I have decided that the problems with LA Fitness tend to rise less in the recurring monthly membership fees (mine are $29.99/month) and more about when you sign up to do extra things like training appointments. Through a series of payment stops, phone calls, emails, texts, and finally, an in-person visit to the gym to talk to the billing manager, I finally resolved what amount of to about $187 worth of overbilling, which may have continued at a pace of a similar amount per month had I not intervened. We’ll see how they do going forward, but I hope and suspect that the problem is now solved, and I assure you, I will open no new cans of worms at LA Fitness.
My next area of attack will be on the McAfee/Norton complex for the simple reason that they do not function on my iPhone or iPad, but rather on a largely unused laptop computer, which I’m thinking I can afford to have at risk since I rarely use it. I anticipate a lengthy battle with many phone calls and emails. I will need to scrape through my credit card files to find out how many times and for how much each of those companies has charged me. There is no doubt in my mind that these leakages exist in all of our financial landscape, but I am not so naïve as to assume that they completely sew up the hole in my pocket.
One of the things my friend Mike is particularly good at is keeping his pockets well sewn. While I doubt that I could ever live the frugal life that Mike chooses, I know he can teach me a lot about controlling expenses. I have already received and absorbed the Costco lesson, even though I bet Kim would argue that I waste more by what I buy at Costco than I save (this has less to do with Costco and more to do with an historical non-shopper like me suddenly being exposed to the array of plenty on the shelves of Costco). But there is more that I can learn from Mike since his COO disposition leaves him very wary of every expense that hits his credit cards. Mike is his own Rocket Money. Mike has never met a microfee that he cannot defeat. If I had a nickel for every micro fee that I have paid either unknowingly or uncaringly, I would be a much richer man.
I think I will take on a project to find and eliminate one source of leakage from my pocket every day for the next month. While I do not doubt that there is meaningful room for budgetary improvement, I also do not think that this will completely solve the pocket hole problem. That may require some behavioral change that I may or may not be prepared to make. We all know what makes us happy and what frustrates us. I suspect Mike and I have very different levels with regard to both sentiments. To adapt a common motto…grant me the ability to reduce the costs I can, accept the costs I choose not to change, and the wisdom to know the difference.